Thursday, March 8, 2012

We've all wasted food, but let me tell
you, you know nothing about wasting food until you've been in a professional
cookery class on Turned Potato Day.

For those of you who are too young to
remember Nouvelle Cuisine or spent the 80s trying to master beurre blanc,
turned vegetables are vegetables – usually roots and tubers – that are
"turned" into five- or seven-sided barrel shapes with a turning knife
(or ordinary paring knife if you're a Turning Genius). It is not something that is relevant any more
(when was the last time you saw a turned vegetable?) or something that you can
learn in a few hours when you've also got another six precision cuts to learn,
but still, it's in the curriculum, so we give it a go.

I show the students a video. Then I demonstrate. Once.
Twice. Three times. These kids try. And fail.
Fail so spectacularly. They fear
cutting towards their thumbs, they fear the long continuous cut, they fear
gripping the veg. One potato looks like
Headless Yoda. One student thinks the pile
of trimmings she's got is the turned potato.
I send them to get more potatoes.
The pile of potato trimmings – not peel, actual potato flesh – grows and
grows.

While they try and fail, I chop up the
potato trimmings and throw them into a pot for potato soup. While I chop, I remember when I learned to
turn veg. I'd already had the obligatory
lesson on turning vegetables but the turning moment, so to speak, was during a week's work
experience at Mietta's in 1993, when Mietta was still alive and her restaurant was one
of Melbourne's flagships. Mietta's had a
traditional French kitchen brigade (read: arrogant, tough, and properly sexist
towards women in the kitchen) and a traditional French menu. No vegetable was ever served in its original
form. Spuds were sliced thickly and then
cut into rounds with a scone cutter.
Perfect baby turnips were shaved.
And carrots were turned. So my
real lesson on turning veg happened when the sous chef pointed at a 10kg bag of
carrots and said, "Turn those!"
By the tenth carrot, my turning was pretty damned perfect. (And I suffered. That amount of turning meant that I ended up
with microscopic cuts all over my thumbs from the motion of stopping the
turning knife. Not a problem, until the
sous chef got me to shell 10kg of Moreton Bay bugs immediately afterwards. Ever had an infection on your thumbs? Not nice.)

But I digress. I hate waste. I use up the potato trimmings for a soup that isn't altogether a
success, and while I'm putting it in the coolroom, I notice the leftover falafel
from a barbeque we catered a few days ago.
They won't see another day, the students prefer the leftover sausages
for their lunch, so I decide to take them home for dinner.

They're pretty good falafels, but
because they were made to not offend teenage palates, they are on the bland
side. So I decide to make some Lebanese
garlic sauce to go with them.

Toum, toom, or zait b'toum is the Holy
Grail for garlic lovers. It's what aioli
should be but isn't since it's been discovered and reinvented for non-Spanish
palates. It is garlic extreme – there's
not even a drop of olive oil to detract from the garlic flavour – and in my
house, I have to stop people pouncing on it with a spoon.

For many years, I relied on my Lebanese
friend Lily for it, because every time I made it, it would curdle, to the point
where even though my children would still eat it, they would call it Garlic
Fail. Until the fateful day when I found
Fouad's recipe and I was able to turn out an entire canister full of Garlic
Win. The family rejoiced and grabbed
spoons.

Fouad's recipe is foolproof, and ideal
for when you need a large amount of toum – I'll keep on using it for the rest
of my life – but despite the food processor, it takes considerable care and
time. It is the only thing I make in the
food processor that actually heats up the motor. And Fouad has since posted a quicker and
easier way to make toum for smaller quantities, but after a recent article on mayonnaise in Serious
Eats, I suspected - sorry, Fouad! - that I could do better.

I did. Last night's toum took two minutes
flat with the stick blender - including the time it took to gather ingredients and peel garlic. And it was full of win. Not just garlicky, but white, perfectly
fluffy and of such enviable texture that I could have cut it with a knife. The leftover falafels went from being
falafels to Those Little Round Things We Can Put Garlic Sauce on. No waste.

TWO-MINUTE TOUM

No joke – this toum will take you two
minutes flat, if that. You're after a
light, fluffy texture, and this recipe will give you that without any effort
whatsoever. No streaming oil in, no
stress about how the emulsion will happen.
Just put the stick in and watch the magic happen. The technique is easy, but if you're nervous, check out the Serious Eats video.

(Makes 1 cup approx.)

Ingredients:

6-8 cloves garlic, peeled

1 tsp. salt

1 egg white

1 tbsp. water

1 tbsp. lemon juice

1 cup (250ml) neutral oil (not grapeseed)

What you do:

1.
Put the garlic and salt into the canister of your stick blender
(immersion blender, stab mixer – whatever).
Stab a few times to process the garlic to a paste. Remove stick blender, pour in remaining
ingredients, and allow to settle for about 15 seconds.

2.
Put stick blender back into canister, resting it on the very bottom, and
switch on. Mixture will begin to
emulsify from the bottom up. When it's
2/3 emulsified, slowly begin lifting out the stick blender. By the time it reaches the surface, all of the
mixture will be completely emulsified and fluffy.